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Comment by AnotXOR | Hacker News Reader

Why do the ISP's even care then? To get that extra $10 or $20, they will with 100% certainty raise everyone's prices then instead of just the high consumers. I absolutely hate the idea of having to pay extra for bandwidth-intensive sites but let's not be under the illusion that we aren't already paying for it, including someone's grandma who only emails and very light browsing, so she's subsidizing my use of Youtube and Netflix already today.

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> Why do the ISP's even care then? To get that extra $10 or $20, they will with 100% certainty raise everyone's prices then instead of just the high consumers

Holy cow, you're right! It's almost like they've got monopolistic pricing power or something!

> I absolutely hate the idea of having to pay extra for bandwidth-intensive sites but let's not be under the illusion that we aren't already paying for it, including someone's grandma who only emails and very light browsing, so she's subsidizing my use of Youtube and Netflix already today.

This is not a well-formed argument against NN.

ISPs today, and under NN rules, can charge by the GB. Why should it matter if the GB's are coming from Youtube or Netflx or newstartup.com? Just charge by the GB.

This is a great point. It allows ISPs to pick the winners when they get the power to shape traffic; if you think governments picking winners and losers is bad, a monopoly doing the same should raise similar hackles.

Charging by the GB is one of the fairest schemes because if it was about usage (i.e. the non-stop-Youtube-watching-bogeyman), then charging by the GB would let them get a fair share.

Not all gigabytes are them same. If you're watching youtube in the middle of the night chances are it doesn't 'cost' much. You're essentially using spare capacity for both Google and your ISP. On the other hand if you're torrenting things from obscure networks at peak times then there's a lot more infrastructure considerations involved.

That net neutrality means that you can't use the network even though it would be available bothers me from a hacker perspective. In that sense it seem much better if there were no "speeds" or "GB" at all and you or the services pay for priority. (which probably isn't how it would play out)

I think our trouble is that we are expecting competitive behaviors from our ISPs when in reality, the only reason we get any price breaks or attempted differentiation is because one part of the de facto duopoly (say cable provider) tries feebly to attract the customer pool from the other part of the duopoly (say the phone company); I am talking about the case where AT&T might try to attract Spectrum customers by offering a price break for a year.

In such a scenario, I would prefer to be billed by the GB, which in my mind is a honest and transparent mechanism for usage. Loss of net neutrality, in addition to all of the other evils that have been mentioned elsewhere in this growing thread, puts yet another power lever in the hands of the duopoly and away from the consumer hands. Why do I think this is bad? Because I have no confidence that once the ISP duopoly has control of traffic prioritization, they have any incentive to dangle it in front of the consumers when it is likely more lucrative to cut a deal with a content provider to force feed the consumer ad-based content vs. paid ad-free content.

I get why people would be concerned and think that net neutrality is there best bet. But the fear is that net neutrality will stand in the way of making the Internet better. The Internet is pretty old in technology terms. Net neutrality seems to also prevent many scenarios that would be good for the Internet.

Since you can't favor certain services that mean you can't favor them even if it's warranted. Say you are charged per GB and one video startup only have servers in another country, while the other is using a caching service at a local data center. It would 'cost' a lot more for the Internet in terms of infrastructure to get that data from the other country. But your ISP still have to charge you the same in GB for each service.

Since you can't favor certain service you also can't faster connection for only some data. Say you are paying for a 10 Mbit connection and buy a game for download. Even though you only need a fast connection for a certain amount of time/data and you've already paid something, there's no way to for the provider to buy high speed data to you. Instead you permanently have to get a faster connection just to have a good experience with service you are already paying for.

Not differentiating different traffic and/or paying per GB enforces this old notion of having your own connection to the Internet. Today there's Internet everywhere, there's few reasons why you should be able to access your services or ISP from other connections. If an ISP can't discount, or even bill, some traffic it's harder to share the connection that already exists with other parties.

As long as there's a monopoly/duopoly they will always charge you, but instead of charging you directly for Netflix traffic they charge you for a faster connection or data overages.

>Since you can't favor certain service you also can't faster connection for only some data. Say you are paying for a 10 Mbit connection and buy a game for download. Even though you only need a fast connection for a certain amount of time/data and you've already paid something, there's no way to for the provider to buy high speed data to you. Instead you permanently have to get a faster connection just to have a good experience with service you are already paying for.

The ISP can't choose for you which services/end-points get favored.

You could get a 10 Mbit/s flat and 100 Mbit/s volume with some User interface to choose "Everything to the flat, [super awesome online shop for games] to the volume"

I just don't see the ISPs as the progressive force that will advance the Internet. They are entrenched, they have a captive customer base, and they have their profits to grow: Internet advancement will IMO be priority last. I don't see holding net neutrality hostage for the scenarios you mention. Consider your upgrade scenario: most companies, without robbing the consumers of net neutrality, already have instant upgrades to bandwidth.

Do you think it's free for YouTube or Netflix to upload their content? Is bandwidth free for you when you host a VM on AWS? If you read about the economics of the internet backbone [1], while slightly old (2004), you can get a more informed view.

Netflix or YouTube, via their commercial internet providers (or the one used by AWS in Netflix's case) have to pay for the packets they exchange with other backbone providers, one way or another. If they sent too many bytes per second, the backbones providers would adjust their prices accordingly. Those 'backbone providers' have no way of enforcing non net-neutral behavior, they would simply be avoided by everyone else. But consumer-facing ISP would want to abuse their unique position between the consumers and the other ISPs and either take the consumers hostage, or the companies that are trying to reach those customers.

Big tech are starting to take measures to prevent themselves from being taken hostage that way (i.e. Google Fiber), but how do we know 20 years from now these companies wouldn't want to engage in the same behavior as the current consumer-facing ISPs want today. Title II classification would ensure this net neutrality stays.

> someone's grandma who only emails and very light browsing, so she's subsidizing my use of Youtube and Netflix already today.

If this was a big problem, providers could provide non-unlimited internet, where you pay per Gb/s used. But if those Gb come from me watching 4k videos, or someone's grandma downloading the entire Wikipedia pages for offline consumption shouldn't matter, they should all come at the same speed, untethered, for everyone.

[1] http://www.netinst.org/ECONOMICS_OF_THE_INTERNET_BACKBONE.pd...

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